Russian rights council asks Prosecutor’s Office to explain mass checks of NGOs

Kremlin and St. Basil's

(Interfax – Moscow, March 21, 2013) Members of the Presidential Human Rights Council (HRC) have appealed to Prosecutor-General Yuriy Chayka with regard to complaints from NGOs from a number of regions in the country about mass checks by the oversight body.

“The last few days have seen an unending flood of reports from the heads of NGOs in Krasnodar, Perm and Maritime Territories, Orenburg, Penza and Rostov Regions, Moscow, St Petersburg and other Russian regions with complaints about unmotivated mass checks by prosecutor’s office bodies,” a statement published on the official HRC website says. It notes that in some cases, the auditors cite instructions from the Prosecutor-General’s Office about checking NGO’s compliance with the federal law on counteracting extremist activity.

“Such an explanation looks strange and unfathomable if one takes into account that representatives of the fire safety, tax, labour and other inspectorates are often brought in for these checks. In some cases, prosecutors do not provide copies of orders for carrying out the checks and do not explain their visit in any other way,” the authors of the statement point out.

“We ask you to advise whether prosecutor’s office bodies have indeed received information about (extremist activity by) several dozen, or maybe several hundred NGOs which are being checked to see if they are carrying out extremist activities, or whether the mass audit of NGOs has some kind of other explanation and motive,” the document says.

The authors of the statement “get the impression that the aim of the checks is to find at least some wrongdoing that the NGO has committed: an out-of-date fire extinguisher, a business trip report put into the wrong folder and so on”.

“We, the members of the Presidential Human Rights Council are sure that fighting extremism and ‘terrorizing’ law-abiding NGOs are far from the same thing. We consider the practice of using audit quantity and the identification of minor shortfalls rather than real results to assess the work of oversight bodies to be unacceptable,” the statement says.

In the near future, the HRC is planning to hold a special meeting with the leadership of the Prosecutor-General’s Office to discuss reports about mass checks of NGOs.

The statement has been signed by several dozen HRC members.

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